It started with André Kertész. A little book called On Reading, in which the Hungarian photographer simply presented pictures of people in the act of reading in public places. There is no text. I have my copy still and I see it is an English reprint dated 1982. I had been interested in photographs long before then, but once I had Kertész’s book, I got my teeth into it.

Was it journalism? Was it some kind of attempt at a catalogue, in which the variety and similarity of human activity would be laid out for comparison and categorisation? Was it a sketch of an autobiography? A book of gently comic illustrations in the manner of Sempé? I remember how long I held that puzzle in my mind. Having no scaffolding of reference to make sense of it, I interrogated those pictures again and again. I discovered in that little book that photographs could convey complexity in spite of their apparent simplicity, and that they amply repaid concentration and analysis.

Although this series will abide only by such rules as I shall feel like following at any given time, it seems fair to start with Kertész, because he started me. The series will develop into a virtual collection of the photographs I would help myself to if money were no object. In the nature of photography, there are many versions of most pictures, and sometimes I can have one and you can have another just as good. I will for that reason suggest places where pictures can be bought if I know of such places and if it seems right to do so. But a virtual collection can be selfish and can certainly be light-fingered. I will have no compunction about plundering public and private holdings in establishing my own, and if I happen to want the only known print of something, well, suck it up. Virtual collecting takes no prisoners. I can see that already, and I haven’t even started yet.

Essentially, these will be things I covet. But I covet photographs as photographs, not as a class of asset. Some will be very valuable; others will be unsellable. And with that, let’s begin.

Kertész was an exile and a freelance. He worked where he could and never allowed himself to lose his own personality in the collective personality of a newspaper. For that reason, he had to trust his own taste. Even when working for another, it was always a Kertész he would make. In 1933, in Paris, his fellow exile György Bölöni invited him to illustrate a life of another Hungarian, the poet Endre Ady. It was published in 1934 as Az Igazi Ady (The Real Ady) by Atelier de Paris, and “Ady’s Poem” is one of the illustrations from it. And what is it? Just a little meditation on reading, and on writing. It’s no big deal, yet it’s marvellous. Loads of people can make a picture of a café table. But not many could get those sweet relations between the straight lines and the curves so absolutely right, and even fewer could make a simple modernist study of materials and surfaces into such an exquisite minor-key sigh for home.

Kertész’s greatest hits are everybody’s greatest hits. “Chez Mondrian”, “Melancholic Tulip”, “Underwater Swimmer” . . . More than anybody else, Kertész is the man who claimed for photography its strange intermediate territory between realism and metaphor. This café table was not much on the day that it happened. But turn it into a photograph like this, and it has become quite something. This print was sold by Sotheby’s in 2006, a little thing, less than 10 x 8 inches. It’s a very rare image in the Kertész canon, yet at £48,000 far, far from his auction record. Its tones were lovely but it wasn’t one of the heavenly miniatures that Kertész made on postcard stock. No doubt, I’ll have one those, later. All in all, nothing gaudy, but a lovely thing with which to set off.